by Neil Powell
I recall quite clearly, for instance, the occasion when you and I and Christopher Eyres were playing the Mozart E flat trio in three different keys simultaneously, and Mr Greatorex marched in looking more than ever like the ‘late’ Beethoven. However, when he found that it was not three rugger hearties wrecking the place but three of his right-hand boys in the music department, he retired baffled. I also remember your sight-reading at the piano the first few pages of the miniature score of the Schubert C major quintet, which neither of us had heard but of which I was about to acquire the records. Your being able to do this struck me as positively miraculous.69
Walter Greatorex emerges in a kindlier light here too; and even Britten’s unquenchable contempt for his performing skills can’t disguise the fact that they developed a fairly amicable working relationship in which Greatorex gave him the run of his music room and allowed him to listen to his records (which is where he did, as it turned out, for the first time hear and like Stravinsky).
By the middle of his second year, Britten’s irritation with Greatorex was tempered by amused tolerance: ‘Gog seems to have meant what he said last term about performing one of my bally works this term,’ he told his parents on 19 January 1930. ‘He asked me for one yesterday; and so I thrust the nicer modern one into his hands – but he nearly choked & so I had to show him the silly small one, and he even calls that one modern!!!’70 The ‘bally work’ – which was performed at Gresham’s on 1 March by Britten (viola), Joyce Chapman (violin: she was a member of the music staff and Britten’s viola teacher at the school) and the inevitable Walter Greatorex (piano) – was reviewed with guarded enthusiasm in the school magazine: ‘[Britten] contributed a Pianoforte Trio in one movement called “Bagatelle”, in which he played the viola part. Written in a modern idiom, the Trio shows that Britten has already advanced a considerable distance in the technique of composition. He should go far and we take this opportunity of wishing him every success in the future.’ In his diary, Britten wrote: ‘It goes very badly! My thing is quite well appreciated but not understood.’71 The audience’s incomprehension was perhaps not so surprising for, as his diaries show, Britten was immersing himself in modernism more deeply than can have been usual in north Norfolk. He had discovered Schoenberg – ‘a marvellous Schönberg concert’ on the radio included Pierrot lunaire which he thought ‘most beautiful’ – and he was to perform the composer’s Six Little Pieces for piano at an evening of ‘modern music’ in Lowestoft that April; he ‘adored’ Picasso’s paintings; and he was reading Swann’s Way, ‘which I love. It is absolutely fascinating.’ (He gives the title in English, so he was presumably using the Scott Moncrieff translation, but his French was good enough for him to have tackled the original.) That he should continue to lose patience with Greatorex was understandable: ‘I really cannot be bothered about him any longer,’ he wrote halfway through the following – and his final – term. ‘He ought to have retired 50 years ago or better never have tried to teach music ever.’72 It was as well that he confined these thoughts to his diary rather than putting them in a letter home: to fulfil the first wish, the ancient-seeming Greatorex, who was really no older than Britten’s father and younger than his mother, would have had to retire at the age of three.
At some point during these two years in Holt – if it occurred at all and if it didn’t occur at South Lodge – the alleged ‘rape’ by ‘a master’ may have taken place. There would certainly have been far more opportunities than ever existed in a school just down the road from home, especially as the public-school life of a musically gifted pupil tends to include such things as privileged access to secluded practice rooms, which Britten would surely have used at all possible hours and some impossible ones too. Carpenter prefers his South Lodge thesis partly because the diary Britten kept at Gresham’s makes no mention of so traumatic an event; but a boy may keep secrets even from his diary, especially if he feels complicit or guilty – and if the diary lives in the not altogether secure environment of a school study. It is surely significant, too, that while the adult Britten would talk cheerfully in interviews about South Lodge, he seldom had a word to say about Gresham’s: blanking out was one mental mechanism he would employ throughout his life to cope with emotional pressure, although in this case his general feelings of loneliness and unhappiness while away at school provide a more than adequate explanation. His other strategy was to retreat into illness, and this he repeatedly did during his time at Gresham’s.
The spring term of 1929, his second at the school, was almost obliterated by his ill health. The trouble began on 24 January with him suffering from ‘my usual bilious complaint plus a nasty feverish cold’; he remained in the school sanatorium until 6 February. Two days later, he wrote a chatty, orange-impregnated letter – he was eating oranges ‘a la Pop’ – to his ‘darling Mummy’, reporting that he was now downstairs though not yet back in school. On 23 February he was taken home to Lowestoft and stayed there until 12 March; but on his return to Holt he immediately fell ill again. He began a rambling letter-diary to his ‘angelic Mummy’ on Monday on 18 March, ‘feeling better, but still rather sickyfied’; despite this, he was tucking into the sponge cake and biscuits she had sent – they were ‘absolutely “it”, you were a pet to send them’.73 Next morning, he had a ‘good breakfast, which consisted of about 7 or 8 pieces of bread and butter and honey, and two cups of tea’ and, a little later, he had ‘just finished the grapes, darling, which were absolutely ripping; you were an angel’; so there was evidently not much wrong with his appetite. Although the term didn’t end until 4 April, he went home on 26 March and was declared ‘out of quarantine’ on 31 March.74 There had been a nastily virulent ‘bug’ of some sort in the school, and it was an exceptionally cold snowy winter, yet two months is a long time for a generally fit and sporty fifteen-year-old to be knocked out of action. The fact that returning to Gresham’s brought an instant deterioration in his condition suggests that the virus was augmented by emotional or psychological pressure. Summer was better, the stress mitigated by cricket and tennis, but by October he was ‘absolutely rotten & sick’ and off school for ten days.
‘How I loathe this abominable hole,’ he complained on his first day back at Gresham’s in January 1930; he briefly contemplated, but rejected, suicide (‘cowardly’) or running away (‘as bad’).75 Meanwhile, he remained observant of details which a less perceptive boy might have found merely irritating rather than intriguing, as when he overheard two boys in nearby beds snoring, one of them when ‘taking breath in and out’, the other ‘only when breathing in’: ‘For about five or even six times they agreed, & then gradually they got out of time, & they took quite a time to get in again. It fascinated me so much that I could not get to sleep.’76 He was ill in February – ‘out of school, and swallowing with considerable difficulty’ – and then again in July, as his School Certificate exams approached: he worried inordinately about these, having failed to distinguish himself academically at Gresham’s, but when the results arrived found that he had passed with five credits. ‘It is simply extraordinary the luck I am having now,’ he wrote.77 By then, in any case, he had cleared a far more important hurdle. On 19 June, he sat the open scholarship exams at the Royal College of Music, a written paper in the morning and, in the afternoon, an oral at which the assessors included Ralph Vaughan Williams and John Ireland: ‘After that I have surprise of winning comp. inspite of 2 brilliant others in final.’ His headmaster at Gresham’s, J. R. Eccles, who may have been painfully aware that his school hadn’t contributed much to this achievement, wrote to Mrs Britten with a warmth which went beyond formal congratulation:
We are delighted at your boy’s fine success & I congratulate you very heartily! We feel some reflected glory & realise that’s a great honour to the School! I am so very glad about it all. He is such a dear boy & so modest about all his brilliant performances! I shall miss him very much.78
If that sounds slightly uncomfortable – an attempt at empathy which misse
s its target – it’s because Britten and Gresham’s had failed to understand each other. He was never going to fit in as a boarder at a public school: on the one hand, he had been too close to home for too long; on the other, he had found his teacher elsewhere, in Frank Bridge. This had irked the music staff at Gresham’s from the start and some of them couldn’t get over it. Miss Chapman’s vinegary comment on Britten’s final school report in July 1930 – ‘When his intonation improves he will be a very useful viola player’ – is a fairly startling example of missing the point. Eccles’s remarks at the foot of the same document, while rightly praising ‘A thoroughly sound & very high principled & delightful boy’, go on to get him wrong in a subtly different way: ‘His music has been a great joy to us all.’79 We can imagine Britten’s wry smile at that. Joy? Yes, sometimes and partly, but he knew that what he was doing was altogether more ambitious and complicated: he must have hoped that at least the Royal College of Music would understand what he was about.
CHAPTER 2
SOME COLLEGE
1930–34
1
At a Lowestoft tennis party during the summer of 1930, Britten was asked what career he was going to pursue. ‘I told them I intended to be a composer. They were amazed! “Yes, but what else?”’1 Auden had received a similarly doubtful response when he informed his Oxford tutor, Nevill Coghill, that he was going to be a poet, though he bumptiously replied: ‘You don’t understand: I’m going to be a great poet.’2 Britten, meanwhile, knew that the alternative career of concert pianist and accompanist had to be kept in reserve, and there’s every likelihood that he would have made a distinguished one: he was later to be described as the finest accompanist in the world by Gerald Moore, who by common consent was the finest accompanist in the world. For this his piano teacher at the Royal College of Music, Arthur Benjamin, though not a kindred spirit in terms of musical taste, deserves much credit: Britten would later recall Benjamin’s kindness in nursing him ‘very gently through a very, very difficult musical adolescence’,3 although at the time he ruefully recorded his piano teacher’s judgement that he was ‘not built for a solo pianist – how I am going to make my pennies Heaven only knows’.4
Nevertheless, by the time he arrived at the RCM on 22 September 1930, he had no real doubt that a composer was what he must be. Neither did his two existing teachers, Harold Samuel and Frank Bridge, and it was this certainty which oddly caused the first of his many difficulties with the college; for each of them had a firm but different idea of who would be the most suitable composition teacher for him. Samuel, writing to congratulate his pupil on his scholarship in late June, advised him ‘to try for R. O. Morris’, while Bridge’s congratulations concluded: ‘I think I might be able to get you under John Ireland for composition…’5 Britten was, perhaps inevitably, inclined to take Bridge’s advice and eventually told him so. Bridge’s reply of 13 August contrasted the two possible teachers as backward- and forward-looking, while tactfully avoiding any mention of Morris by name, and made what he must have known to be the clinching point: ‘If I were a young man I should plump for a live composer whose activities are part of the present-day outlook with a heavy leaning towards tomorrow’s.’6 But by this time Samuel, to whom Britten had been slow in responding while he dithered and discussed the matter with Bridge, had ‘already fixed it for you to study with Mr R. O. Morris’. ‘I feel,’ he added, ‘that Mr Morris is the very man for you, and particularly calculated to supply you with what you need.’7 This, Britten noted in his diary for 22 August, was ‘an upsetting letter’. He wasn’t alone in being upset: through his own dilatoriness he had managed to offend both his former piano teacher and a distinguished member of the RCM’s staff even before he arrived at the college.
Harold Samuel’s emphatic though rejected opinion that Morris was ‘the very man for you’ is worth pondering for a moment. Reginald Owen Morris’s former pupils included the composers Gerald Finzi and Howard Ferguson (for some time Samuel’s lodger), both of whom Britten would come to know, if not especially to admire, during his London years: it was Ferguson who, in Britten’s first week at the RCM, took him to a Prom at the Queen’s Hall to hear a ‘delicious’ Mozart concerto and Mahler’s Fourth Symphony, which he thought ‘Much too long, but beautiful in pts’;8 they left at the interval, because ‘the second part was all Elgar’.9 Morris, who was the author of Contrapuntal Technique in the Sixteenth Century (1922), had ‘a reputation as the country’s best teacher on the stricter side’,10 as Diana McVeagh judiciously puts it in her biography of Finzi. Was Samuel therefore implying that his former pupil, whose enthusiasm for the European avant-garde was approaching its height, could do with some corrective emphasis on counterpoint and a deeper historical perspective? If so, he may have had a point, for students sometimes learn as much by reacting against their teachers as by sympathising with them. On the other hand, Morris was incurably wedded to English musical conservatism – almost literally so, for his wife’s sister was married to Vaughan Williams and he shared his brother-in-law’s London house in Cheyne Row – and this aspect of Morris’s musical character would surely have provoked Britten, had they worked together, to something more toxic than creative disagreement. When he heard broadcast performances of Morris’s compositions, he was dismissive: ‘dreadful concoctions’11 he called them on one occasion, while on another he ‘struggled for about three or four minutes with R. O. Morris and then switched off’.12
John Ireland, who had established a reputation as one of England’s leading contemporary composers and whose previous pupils included E. J. Moeran and Alan Bush, clearly seemed to be the better choice; but he was to prove troublesome in ways which greatly distressed the prim and provincial young Benjamin Britten. With a homosexual past and a failed marriage behind him, Ireland was now living alone at his dirty, chaotic house in Gunter Grove, while involved in an intense though non-sexual relationship with his star pupil, Helen Perkin. Contrary to college regulations, he did much of his teaching at home, where he was sometimes drunk. On one occasion, arriving for a lesson which had been rescheduled from 10 in the morning to 8.45 in the evening, Britten was appalled to discover his teacher in an incapable state, urinating on the carpet: this lesson, he said with characteristic understatement, was ‘not a good one … not improved by the fact that he [Ireland] was quite drunk most of the time – foully so’.13 Ireland was often either dreadfully late or entirely absent without notice, a trait Britten discovered during his very first week at the college: ‘Waiting for J. Ireland 1½ (10–11.30), & he eventually doesn’t turn up,’ as he drily put it, apparently without rancour, in his diary for 25 September 1930.14 The rancour would come later.
Although his personal life was in a mess, Ireland was at this time enjoying considerable success as a composer. His piano concerto in E flat, published in 1930 and dedicated to Helen Perkin, was so well received that he found himself dubbed ‘the English Rachmaninov’, an intended compliment which is unlikely to have much impressed Britten, who thought Rachmaninov’s immensely popular second concerto ‘vulgar’ and ‘old-fashioned’;15 the lustre of Ireland’s concerto was such that Artur Rubinstein chose to play it at his Proms debut in 1936. It is less highly regarded today, although Grove rather surprisingly calls it ‘a classic of 20th-century English music’. There is indeed some romantically Rachmaninovian piano writing in the opening movement, compromised by a jauntily infantile motif; the second movement starts well, with interesting string textures, but the solo theme lacks shape and memorability; while the lively if conventional third movement is oddly interrupted by a brief dialogue between piano and solo violin which threatens a descent into the purest Palm Court. There was little here to excite someone who had studied with Bridge and begun to take an interest in the music of the Second Viennese School, yet Britten was at first inclined to give the work, its composer and its dedicatee the benefit of the doubt: hearing it at a Prom on 2 October 1930, he found it ‘very beautiful, interesting & excellently played’16 while an RCM
concert in December included ‘J. Ireland pft. concerto (which I like better each time – Helen Perkin played it beautifully)’.17 Perhaps he was just being polite. When he heard the concerto again, less than a year later, he thought it ‘very loosely put together’,18 while exactly two years after that, recently graduated and no longer in awe of his former teacher, he listened to another broadcast performance of Ireland’s ‘meandering Pft concerto’ and commented: ‘The form is loose & it really is only cheap ballade music (attractive in its way) touched up.’19
If Britten had thought that studying with Ireland might spare him some of the contrapuntal rigours of R. O. Morris, he was swiftly disabused. Ireland, ‘very nice tho’ very subduing’, was ‘going to take me thro’ a course of Palestrina; tho’ to reassure me tells me that every musician, worth his salt has done this’. A week later, after a ‘topping lesson’, he added: ‘He is terribly critical and enough to take the heart out of any one!’20 ‘Ireland & Benjamin are very nice still,’ he said, writing home in late October, and that ‘still’ reminds us that a month can be a long time in the life of a sixteen-year-old. ‘The former is still terribly strict & I am plodding through Counterpoint & Palestrina at the moment.’21 His diaries repeatedly portray Ireland as fierce and discouraging – at the beginning of his second term, Britten felt that he seemed ‘to be doing nothing right or worth doing nowadays’22 – yet he doesn’t actually sound disheartened, and as he came to know his teacher better he began to value him more: soon after the start of his second year, for instance, he was writing of an ‘Amazingly good, & frightfully instructive lesson from Ireland’.23 What vexed him almost beyond endurance was Ireland’s appalling timekeeping, the cancelled or truncated lessons; of one, Britten complained that he spent half the time correcting proofs of his teacher’s piano concerto, after which Ireland spent the rest of the lesson on the telephone, ‘so I don’t get much out of that!’24 Yet even this was part of a wider vexation with the Royal College of Music, which he had swiftly decided was not much good. Ireland wasn’t alone in failing to keep appointments: Britten’s diaries record his repeatedly frustrated attempts to arrange meetings with the college’s director, Sir Hugh Percy Allen, who was almost as afflicted by lateness and invisibility as his composition teacher. As for Dr Buck’s music dictation classes, they were so ‘petty’ that he immediately asked to be moved up two sets and at the start of his second term dropped them altogether. On 15 May 1931, he went into the college ‘to find my Comp. lesson has been moved to Thursdays, only the Coll. has not informed me of this, so that I miss a lesson this week. This Establishment!’ he grumbled.25 He sounded an identical note of contempt exactly two years later: ‘Some College’ – this time unpunctuated, leaving the rest unsaid.26 It wasn’t an opinion that would mellow with time. ‘They don’t seem very happy in retrospect,’ he said of his student days in 1963. ‘I feel I didn’t learn very much at the Royal College of Music. I think I can say that at the Royal College not nearly enough account was taken of the exceptionally gifted musician.’27